“Rescuing the novel Letters between four giants of Latin American literature” by David Gallagher (TLS; En)

An absolutely brilliant piece about Latin American literature and its pillars—the writers that shaped the modern literary canon:

From the mid-1960s there was growing international interest in Latin American fiction. Critics had become pessimistic about the future of the novel in general, but these four novelists believed they were on a rescue mission. Fuentes writes to Vargas Llosa in 1964 that “the future of the novel is in Latin America, where everything is yet to be said and to be named”. Vargas Llosa had long regarded the European novel as having reached a dead end. He was especially scathing about the French nouveau roman. Answering Fuentes, he derides the writer and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet for claiming that “literature has nothing to say”, that its only purpose is the “creation of innovative form”. Fortunately, he goes on, Latin America has “the energy, the myths, the stories capable of saving the genre”. ©